Game of Cats and Mice
by Hopeless Desires
Summary: It isn't often one can last long in a game created by Orihara Izaya. It has certainly never happened in which someone managed play against him and turn the game over. To say Haruki was unfortunately interesting to many would be summarizing it. – Devious!Male!OC. Iza/OC/? /slight - AU/


**Game of Cats and Mice**

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It isn't often one can last long in a game created by Orihara Izaya. It has certainly never happened in which someone managed play against him and turn the game over. To say Haruki was unfortunately interesting to many would be summarizing it. –Smart! Male! OC, slight AU. IzaOC?

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**Warning:** Lots of psychology. Devious! OC. Charismatic! OC. Genuinely Nice! OC. Male OC. Close friendships between canon and original characters. Equality, regardless of culture. Oh, and sort of time travel. Slight AU. Side plot. Izaya/MaleOC/?.

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**Pairings **to be voted on

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**The age of consent in Japan is thirteen/13**. Haruki's age has to be determined, although his alias states his age as fourteen/14. You were warned, but I hope you know this is fiction and Mikado and Masaomi (both often paired with Izaya and Shizu-chan) are both fifteen.

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** Chapter **one has _unfortunate side effects_

(unedited – soon to be edited)

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><p>It turns out the world can ignore fourteen (<em>fifteenfifteenfiteen) <em>witnesses.

"I can't tell the actual law enforcement people about what happened?" he repeated dully. Azumi didn't look away, didn't even look ashamed. Instead, she looked back at him with guarded eyes.

"Yes."

"Hm. Do you mind explaining this again to me?"

Azumi tapped the contract paper with a finger, taking the action as an excuse to look away. "If you accept this contract, you can never take this issue to court, and you will be given money as a compensation. If you speak publically about your experiences during All-Ice's experiment, you will forfeit this contract. If you use any of the money before forfeiting the agreement, you will have to pay the company back." The check was right there, next to the woman's right hand. Was it supposed to tempt him? Didn't they realize his brother had just died and the world was veering on black territory in his eyes? Tempting him with money wasn't helpful to his psychological state. Unless…they were trying to unhinge him to use his emotions as a coercion tool.

Possibly. Better to overestimate than underestimate.

"Of course, another compensation for you, if you agree to this contract, is for us to inform you about the experiments, why All-Ice chose you to participate, and we will offer you a second try at life through a new, clean record with a new identity. You can have a new name, you can have no other familial relationships, and you will get a house and education." Ah. So they were trying to manipulate him. Making him angry at the mention that they would pay his brother's death away, and then offering answers to the questions eating his insides alongside a ticket out from the shame of being his twin's cause of death. Wily.

But he was nothing if not cunning, especially after being forced into a psychological game against others.

…Still, his palms stung with new injuries as his nails dug into them. His face had its sad, childish expression on.

"I see. Basically, I can't say anything about it at all. If anyone speaks up about this, it has to be the company." A small smile played on his lips, choking on dark humor. It died soon enough.

"A second chance at life." The lawyer repeated, smiling compassionately although her eyes were set on being half-lidded, as if she was trying not to see what was happening, what she was doing. "If you pursued a case against them you would not get out fortunate. No one would believe you, anyway. This is better in the long run."

"They killed my brother. I have fifteen witnesses." He choked momentarily, the woman flinched, mask dropping into a grimace of pure shame. "Ah, sorry, fourteen."

"We would also train you in your abilities. To make sure you don't cause harm towards yourself or people with deep connections towards you, and help them in their time of need," she added off-handedly, but in reality, here laid the real contract. They would always get their way, Haruki would never win. A company's word against a boy, a mafia family against a child, one lawyer against him – he was never going to win this. It was unfair, but the world was unfair. Now, though, he knew what they really wanted.

They were just as sick as the woman who kidnapped him. They all wanted the same thing – All-Ice had just gotten the idea first, and they got interested.

"I'll take the money and the information, sans the vengeance and training." He told her. She seemed taken aback.

She griped for words before falling back on, "You can't."

He raised his eyebrows at her, widening his eyes childishly. "Huh? But, they're rewards, yeah? I don't want the vengeance. I mean, you aren't gonna force me to take something that would benefit you alone, yeah?"

"Haruki-kun," she said patronizingly, "It doesn't work like that. You have to take all the rewards or we'll look bad."

"Against whom?" he let a withering smile play at his lips for a moment. "The public don't know about your bribery, which is shameful enough. Surely shushing money is going to be the center of their attention more than a kid who doesn't want to be trained as a child soldier?"

Despite her blank mask, Haruki could see the young woman was troubled with guilt. She'd played the other children like dolls, watched them cry, watched them swallow their pride, and manipulated them into snatching up the money, signing their freedom away for a little coverage over a tragic chapter of their life. She forced children into a synonym of slavery and she hated her job every minute of every day. Haruki hated her right back.

Instead of words, Azumi opted to take the pen and add two zeroes next to the amount of money.

Haruki had a sinking feeling in his stomach he wouldn't get out of this well.

"No thanks," his smile turned deadly, stretching into a plasticity reserved for dolls, "I'm not going to take millions of yens to keep quiet about my little brother's murder. I'm not going to offer my life to you, when I've had my family taken."

"Haruki-kun—"

"If it makes you feel better about turning me into your minion with the reward of money and some information, if it makes you sleep better with the belief that you'd done nothing to us, nothing bad, then believe that. Believe your delusions in your own justice, and leave me to mine. I'm tired, and I just want to go home." If it helped, the tiredness in his voice was real – none of the acting he'd gained from being in a sick game or receiving a small batch of memories from his future, possibly sociopathic self.

"Haruki-kun," the woman seemed pretty guilty now, "please –"

"Lawyer-san," he echoed, "please."

And then, despite the shameshameshame and self-disgust, he added, "Besides, if I had even a little of this ability, do you think Haruka would be dead?"

The woman's lips tightened and turned white.

He wanted to scream at her – wasn't three months enough? Wasn't Haruka enough? - but the biting comments on his tongue remained trapped behind the solid ache in his throat, and instead of words or pleas, a sob emerged- a low, harsh sound. No tears fell, but the woman looked up at him in alarm.

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><p>"You can't tell," this time, a man in a black suit told him. Haruki knew him –<p>

_(-"You can't leave," this time, a man in a black suit told him. Haruki knew him –)_

Haruki wouldn't tell, but not just because they asked him.

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><p>Ikebukuro, a commercial and entertainment district of Tokyo and the largest city in Toshima-ku. It housed many myths, some bordering on supernatural – withering smile briefly turned his lips as he left the train – and others your everyday homicidal Jack the Ripper wanna-bes.<p>

Haruki – or was it Rin, now? He had, after all, asked for two different IDs, and the one he was using now was fourteen year old Namikaze Rin, new student at Raira Academy's Middle School Division – cared little for meeting a supernatural myth that might or might not help him. That was for later. Right now, he was more interested in the recently merged company, Yagiri Pharmaceuticals.

Another victim, Kido Kyouko, had smuggled some information to him through a computer. Since she hadn't been capable of eluding the grasp of All-Ice's former company, she was stuck there along with her younger brother, Shintaro. She was blind in one eye because of the experiment, and had offered him her help after they'd escaped the laboratory. Apparently, her mother was a hacker that worked for a company and had often sat down and taught her children how to hack as a sort of bonding time since she wasn't very good with children. All Rin had to do was give her his IP address before the lawyer and the man in the suit had some security escort him out of the building in the guise of a hug.

He took out his iPhone, near completely hack proof (the money he'd gotten from the contract was nice when getting an underground hacker to safe proof his phones) and opened the Notes app; he had copied her message into the app.

_- Kido Kyouko –_

_Yagairi Pharmaceuticals – name written on contract with All-Ice – Japanese._

_Former Chief: Nami Yagiri. Current location - ? Company sold and merged to American company Fredrickson Medical Studies. Used to be in Ikebukuro. _

_I might not be able to play detective with you for much; my parents are demanding and have put Shintaro and I through strenuous study sessions. Good luck, and I hope I see you soon!_

_- xoxoxo Kyo-chin for the winwin!_

He absently climbed the stairs to the streets. Kido hadn't added the 'play detective' and 'parents are strict' bit – he had; he couldn't let anyone who came upon his iPhone and somehow opened it to think he was in seriously criminal territory. Despite that, reading the message made an unidentifiable emotion curl in his stomach. He'd escaped further experiments, they hadn't.

Haruki never forgets his friends, however short of a time they'd spent and the odds against them. He just couldn't take remembering the days he'd been tortured and imagining anybody going through years of indoctrination and brief torture, much less what Kida and Shintaro-kun and Annie and Akane and Hotaru and the others.

The weather was a bit humid that day. He closed his eyes at the assault of sudden sunlight. Wearing contacts made his eyes water more, so sunrays weren't something he wanted to brave right now. He'd have to ditch the contacts; they were too obvious, especially if he wanted to hang around policemen and women.

Ah, yes.

Enemoto Haruki was dead. No matter how many finger prints and how many DNA scans they did, they wouldn't connect him to Haruki. On the other hand, it would connect him to Namikaze Rin, fourteen years old with a clean background, sent to Ikebukuro for unimportant reasons and a detective wanna-be who had hung around at his rural Japanese village's police headquarters and was generally in a good relationship with the police there.

Heck, it wouldn't connect them straight away – apparently his mother was some sort of foreign agent and all records related to her were locked down until permission was gained. That permission, of course, was his to decide to grant.

He would probably not grant it for anyone other than the police – Namikaze Rin wasn't exactly clean, even if people didn't connect his criminal alias to Rin. And it wasn't weird for the FBI to deny handing over records.

_Yagiri Namie…? _He smiled softly.

_Just wait. I'm coming for you._

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><p><strong>AN: **Ahhh~ I've been bottling up the need to publish a DRRR fanfic for a while. I got at least three serious ideas but no time.

Just to make it clear: I update at least twice a month, but only for two of my fics based on my mood and reader feedback (because I need to know if there's someone reading this). Also, this will have a side plot. And character interaction. And hopefully it will be interesting. I've noticed a lack of Male!OCs in the fandom and I was very sad.

Lastly – please review. I'd love to focus on this fic, but I have lots of other ones and I need to know that this fic is actually important enough to gurantee me continuing it, especially with my added school baggage along with another linguistic program that is honestly tiring.

(Read: Oh dear god I really want to continue this PLEASE LET ME HAVE AN EXCUSE TO TELL ME OTHER READERS OR ELSE I WILL BE SKINNED ALIVE.)

Thanks for reading!

Drop a review,

**Hopeless Desires.**


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